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Adapting to Your Audience In Writing: a Bad Idea

April 4, 2022

creativity, fiction, intended audience, literature, writing

“Adapt to your audience” is a sentence I’ve seen used by many so-called writing advisors. It’s a bad idea to begin with, for any artistic context. But adapting to your audience in writing is a truly awful idea, for reasons we’ll examine.

Let’s get some definitions out of the way first: What do we mean by “adapting to your audience”? This basically means to take readers’ feedback into consideration and alter the work accordingly.

For advance readers (that is, beta readers) this means modifying your novel to suit the (extrapolated) audience’s desires, even before publishing. Otherwise, it means taking feedback and reviews into consideration and “give people what they want” in the future.

Either option is awful. Let’s see why.

Adapting to your audience is easy if that is an abstract **intended** audience (existing in your head), because the audience is then a homogeneous, controllable – by you – entity. Hardly the case in real life

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Mediocre Fiction: Why Is There so Much of It?

March 28, 2022

Writing

capitalism, fiction, literature, society, writing

Mediocrity is one of the things that occupy much of my time – on the blog and otherwise. We’re surrounded by mediocrity, and there are clear, simple reasons for this, which I’ll talk about in this post. More importantly, for the topics of the blog, what concerns me is mediocre fiction.

The whole concept is somewhat tricky. After all, I’ve claimed that:

You get the idea…

So, if literature is very hard to approach objectively, how can we speak of mediocre fiction? To put it another way, what makes mediocre fiction… mediocre?

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How to Get Writing Advice Successfully

March 7, 2022

Writing

author, book, fiction, literature, writing

This is quite the meta-post: I’ll be offering you advice on how to successfully get writing advice. More maddeningly, perhaps, I’ll be partly asking you to ignore writing advice – advice which you’d have to ignore in order… not to ignore it. There are no simple answers, sorry!

Overall, what this little linguistic and conceptual wizardry underlines is:

Writing fiction is a complex process; it’s both art and isn’t.
Crucially, a certain level of critical thinking is required in order to know what advice to follow.

This latter part is what I’ll be focusing on in this post. I’ll offer you tools that will help you know what to do so that you get writing advice successfully. That is, what to do so that any writing advice you’re getting is actually helping you instead of misleading you.

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